


Leashing Machiavelli

by Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Hannibal Loves Will, M/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Will Graham Loves His Dogs, Will Loves Hannibal, well his new dog anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-09-28 02:05:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10065293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: “Something bigger than he is had its teeth in him,” Will says, looking at the ugly gashes and puncture wounds that mar the stray dog’s neck and shoulders.“And yet he escaped,” Hannibal finishes. There is a pause as they both watch the dog as he glares up at them with his one cunning yellow eye.“Will,” Hannibal asks, “would you like to keep him?” and Will gives an incredulous bark of laughter that sets the dog to snarling again.When Hannibal says nothing else, Will takes his eyes from the dog long enough to glance back at him. There is speculation on his face but no humor. “You’re serious.”"Very much so."(AKA the "Will and Hannibal find a dog that is perfect for them" fic).





	1. Chapter 1

Had Hannibal had not been with him Will probably wouldn’t have stopped for the dog.

The idea of dogs seemed to Will to be incongruous to his life with Hannibal, one of the sacrifices that he locked away in a box far from his heart when he chose what he’d chosen, and he so he’d done his best to avoid dwelling too long on any of the strays that they've encountered in their travels. 

But Hannibal is with him now, and it is Hannibal who pauses in his stride, curious, when the sound of the growling comes to them, his head cocked as though he's caught some note of unexpected music.

Will follows him into the alley. 

The animal behind the dumpster is as filthy as Will's ever seen, the color of his fur rendered a matter of speculation by layers of mud and lord only knew what else matted into the coat. He crouches, growling over a large and unidentifiable hunk of greening meat, clearly convinced that they mean to steal it from him. 

“That is  _ probably _ a dog,” Will says, trying to take the bite out of the ache in his chest at seeing the ragged starved thing. "But it's hard to say for sure."

At the sound of his voice, the dog shows his teeth, and Will sees that they are white and clean - a young dog’s teeth, or else those of a pet who until fairly recently had been well-cared for. 

“Stray or feral?” Will wonders out loud, and as he and Hannibal step closer the low growls escalate into vicious snarling. 

 “You see the gashes,” Hannibal says, not a question. It would be impossible not to see them; they run diagonally along the dog’s face, over the red crater of his ruined eye, and down the muzzle. There are puncture wounds around the dog’s neck and shoulders, too, and even from yards away Will can smell the infection brewing in them. 

“Something bigger than he is had its teeth in him,” Will says. The dog’s frame is fairly large, and fleshed out Will thinks that he  would weigh perhaps fifty pounds. As things look now, though, taut skin over protruding bones, Will doubts that he weighs considerably more than half that much.

“And yet he escaped,” Hannibal finishes. There is a pause, in which they both watch the dog as he glares up at them with one cunning yellow eye. 

“Will,” Hannibal asks, “would you like to keep him?” and Will gives an incredulous bark of laughter that sets the dog to snarling again. 

When Hannibal says nothing else, Will takes his eyes from the dog long enough to glance back at him. There is speculation on his face but no humor. “You’re serious.”

“Very much so.”

“In that case, give me your belt.”

Hannibal’s mouth purses, briefly, having not considered the possibility that such a sacrifice might be asked of him, but he hands the belt over to Will. Will takes off his own and fastens the two of them together, then makes a loop at one end.  

Hannibal watches as Will advances on the dog slowly, crouching to make himself look smaller. His voice is soft and coaxing, a steady prattle meant to soothe. It’s a type of hunter’s stalk, the sidelong way that Will approaches the animal, and the calculating gentleness of Will’s manner makes something in Hannibal’s chest feel tight. 

Habit and instinct move Hannibal to inch closer to the both of them, readying himself to block the dog’s path should he manage to bolt past Will. 

Bringing the loop of the belt up slowly, Will attempts to lower it over the dog’s head. He snaps at the leather, trying to tug the belts from Will’s hands, and when this effort fails he presses his entire body against the side of the wall, seemingly trying sink into the bricks. The dog’s upper lip curls and drops spasmodically. Growls reverberate in its thin chest.  

Will creeps closer, but now the dog refuses to extend his neck, and Hannibal almost believes that he understands the trap that Will is seeking to spring on him. 

“He’s a clever sonofabitch,” Will says, as though he had read Hannibal’s thoughts. Trying a different approach, Will extend his free hand towards the dog’s muzzle, wiggling his fingers, and when the dog lunges forward to snap at them Will drops the loop around its neck and pulls it tight in the same instant that he jerks his other hand away. Teeth click together on thin air where an instant before Will’s hand had been. 

The feeling of the impromptu leash around his neck seems to calm the dog. He strains against it, facing Will, his paws planted on the pavement, but not violently. Will moves slowly towards him, taking in the slack on the belts as he does so to keep the dog from backing away. 

Will watches the dog’s one bright eye as he lowers his hand towards his muzzle, knowing that he will see the intent to bite there, should it appear, before any other sign. Instead, the dog gives a solicitous whine and wags his tail uncertainly. 

When Will scratches him behind the ear, careful to avoid touching lacerations, the dog leans into his touch. 

“More scared than really aggressive,” Will says, glancing up at Hannibal. The instant he breaks eye contact with the dog, before the last syllable is hardly out of his mouth, the dog jerks his head to the side and sinks his teeth deep into the meat of Will’s forearm. 

The danger rises in Hannibal in the blink of an eye, far more quickly than it did in the dog, and Will knows from experience how quickly he moves and how brutal his hands are when he perceives Will to be at risk. 

“Stop,” Will says, and all the muscles that had been poised to carry Hannibal forward to his rescue go rigid and then slowly relax into stillness as the panicked rage fades away. Will drops his eyes back to the dog, embarrassed and not wanting to acknowledge that embarrassment or Hannibal’s own.  

“It’s not that bad anyway,” Will lies, though they can both see that it’s bad enough that he’s going to need stitches. “And anyway, I’ve had my rabies shot.” 

He hands the leash over to Hannibal and wraps his scarf around the bite, more or less hiding the injury from passersbys and slowing the flow of blood.  

 

“He did that on purpose, you know,” Hannibal says, as they walk home. “He was trying to get you to drop the leash.”

“Don’t give him too much credit,” Will says, vaguely miffed. The pain is starting to catch up with him. “He’s an animal.”

“I know what I saw.”

“Yeah, well, if that was really the case I’d have thought you’d be more put out on my behalf.”

Hannibal knows Will doesn’t mean it. “You have to allow that it was a cunning trick.”

“Sure was.”

“We’ll call him Machiavelli,” Hannibal declares.

“We absolutely will  _ not _ ,” Will says, rolling his eyes. But after thinking about it for a little while, Will relents and meets him halfway. 

“Prince,” he says, and smiles down at the dog trotting between them. 


	2. Chapter 2

In the usual course of things, Will would have expected a new dog to shy away from entering the cottage, maybe even pull back against the leash and whine.  

He is not especially surprised, though, to watch Prince trot through the doorway at Hannibal’s side without the slightest hesitation. Once inside, he looks around at his surroundings, an air of entitlement clear in his body language.

Prince raises his nose in the air and sniffs. It’s hard to say if Hannibal leads the dog to the kitchen or if it’s the other way around.

Will leans against the doorframe and watches Hannibal move around the kitchen, navigating around the dog, who despite having been freed from the loop of belt is sticking close to Hannibal, his head craned upwards expectantly.

“Don’t give him too much at once,” Will cautions, when Hannibal removes the container of minced meat from the fridge. “He’ll throw up.”

Hannibal looks over his shoulder at Will with hooded eyes, and Will catches a glimpse of something there, one of the things of which they never speak directly but that Hannibal has on occasion allowed Will to inch towards, so long as he is quiet and disturbs nothing.

Will imagines a young boy, as ragged and starved as the dog and with the same cunning glint in his sunken eyes, come at last to some place of relative warmth and comfort, looking down at his first real meal in ages and commanding himself mercilessly to not take another bite, lest he lose everything that he’d already eaten, ignoring his body’s pleas for more.     

“I’m aware,” Hannibal says, his tone deceptively light.

He puts the plate of raw meat and a bowl of clean water on the floor and then goes to the closet to get his black bag.

Prince scarfs down the food, as any hungry dog would, and Will is temporarily reassured of the animal’s semi-normality.

 

Before they bathe the dog, Will puts plastic wrap around his forearm to keep the new stitches and bandage dry.

They do it in Hannibal’s big stainless steel work sink, and and as the layers of filth melt away under the warm spray of the hose, the dog’s coat is revealed to be a sunny shade of golden that fades to cream under the jaw and along the chest and belly.

“He looks a bit like a dingo, doesn’t he?” Hannibal asks, from over his shoulder. He is poised, a large and soft towel in his hands, to descend on the dog as soon as Will turns the water off. He has been warned that if he is not quick enough Prince is likely to shake himself dry without regard for the effect this act would have on their surroundings.

“Yeah. Or a pariah dog. Or Carolina dog. Village dog. We used to just call them yella dogs when I was a kid. It’s the ancestral form to which dogs everywhere seem to revert after a few generations, when humans aren’t directing their breeding.”

“But he’s not wild?”

“He’s not entirely domesticated, not in the sense that something like a toy breed is, but he’s a dog. He’s tameable and he’s teachable. They’re smart - they can survive on their own wits, and they know it.”

“It’s bad luck that he’s come to be in this condition, then, and not a lack of ability.”

“That’s my guess.”

Hannibal seems pleased by the answer. “Charming curl to the tail,” he says, watching Will rub soap into it.

The right side of Will’s mouth twitches into a smile at that, but the rest of his face remains fixed in concentration. Prince has - so far - accepted the bath stoically, but Will knows that he might decide in a flash to bolt from the sink or to bite.

The dog’s fur is short and stiff, and as he works the soap in Will rakes back the hair along his lower back and curls his lip at the cascade of fleas that flee in his wake. The dog’s skin is reddened and bumpy from their bites, scabby in places, and he turns up the water pressure and rakes the nozzle through Prince’s fur, feeling a small jolt of vindictive pleasure to see a number of the parasites knocked loose from the dog and washed down the drain. He adds flea treatment to the shopping list that he has been building in his head. 

Will turns the water down to a gentle tickle before running it over the dog’s torn muzzle, and then Prince does show a flash a fang. Will withdraws the water and scratches him behind the ear for a minute or two, letting him think about what had just happened and get used to the idea that it would happen again. Then he runs the water over the side of Prince's muzzle again, and this time the dog tolerates it.

“Is it alright if water gets in the socket?” Will asks Hannibal, looking into the redden shadowy gap where the dog’s eye had been.

“A little water won’t do any harm,” Hannibal says, “but don’t worry about cleaning it. I’ll flush it later, after I’ve given him something to stave off pain.”

When the dog is as clean as he’s likely to get today, Will glances back at Hannibal and asks, “Ready?” Hannibal nods, and in the same instant that Will turns off the water and steps back he sweeps in and wraps the cotton towel around the dog. Their synchronization is flawless. 

Prince leans into the towel as though enjoying the rubdown, seems to luxuriate in the feel of the soft Egyptian cotton.  

 _Oh boy,_ Will thinks. 


	3. Chapter 3

There is, by mutual silent agreement, no talk of muzzling the dog. 

Hannibal selects a vial of ketamine from among his collection of pharmaceuticals and draws a small quantity of the drug into a syringe. “I wouldn’t want to risk giving him too much, as poor a condition as he’s in, but this should help him relax and take the edge off the pain.” 

“That’s the same one you used on yourself when we were patching you up, after,” Will observes. The associations are not pleasant - when they’d pulled each other from the water Hannibal had been a mess. It was touch and go for a while. 

Hannibal nods. When he injects the dog in the scant meat of his hindquarter, Prince does not so much as flinch. As they wait for the medication to take effect Will runs his hand down the dog’s knobby spine. 

When the dog’s eyes begin to droop and his head starts to sag Will shows Hannibal how to restrain him; head pressed against Hannibal’s chest and held in place with his right hand curled around the muzzle, the other arm hooked under the dog’s chest. 

Working on the side of the dog that is not pressed against Hannibal, Will clips away the fur surrounding that scratches and bite wounds. “You’ve never had a dog before?” he asks as he works, not really a question. 

“No. We had swans when I was a boy. But they tended to themselves.”

“Swans,” Will repeats. 

“And a good horse. A draft animal, very gentle.” Hannibal’s fingers are moving on the dog’s chest, not exactly petting but rather tracing the contours of the exposed ribs thoughtfully. 

“Use the saline solution to flush out those deeper puncture wounds, Will,” he adds. 

Will, who had intended to hand this part of the job over to Hannibal, feels a twinge of annoyance. “You’ve got him tight?” he asks. 

“Yes, Will.” And then, contradicting: “He won’t bite again - not over his wounds being treated, in any case. He’s very stoic.” 

Will thinks that the dog seems closer to stoned than anything else, but he supposes that’s more or less the same thing. “Yeah, well, if you end up with a face that looks even worse than mine you’ll only have yourself to blame.”

When the wounds have been clean, Will takes up the needle before Hannibal has a chance to suggest that he do so. He can see how this is going, and he knows that if he tried to hand that piece of work over to Hannibal he would only insist that Will take this opportunity to practice making stitches.  

He talks to the dog, instead. “You know what he’s doing?” he asks Prince, sourly. “He’s making me do all the bad guy stuff so you’ll like him more.”

“Do you think that it will work?” Hannibal asks, curiously. 

Ignoring him, Will makes his voice conspiratorial. “Don’t fall for it. He’s a masterful manipulator.” 

When Will has finished working on the left side of the dog, they coax him into turning around so he can do the other. 

“Let’s give him a little rest first,” Will says, and Hannibal nods agreeably. 

His hand strokes the dog’s back, hand moving in exactly the same arc that Will’s had earlier. Hannibal often mimes him like that, and sometimes it is deliberate, but not always. There’s almost a sense of dysphoria to it for Will, the feeling that when he watches Hannibal’s hands he is watching his own, disembodied and transfigured. 

Before, it had always been Will who matched his body and movements to those of others, whether he wanted to or not. He’s started to understand why Hannibal finds that so thrilling. 

The dog leans into Hannibal’s touch, and Will finds himself caught somewhere between feeling glad and feeling jealous. There’s a hint of spite to his words when he says, “I’d have thought you’d go for something a little more cute.”

“Cute,” Hannibal repeats, flatly. 

“Well - Ornamental, maybe. Something small and tidy that could be trusted not to piss on the Persian rug or chew up a $800 pair of loafers. Rarified bloodline and a family tree full of blue ribbons, all that.”

  
“You’d never enjoy keeping such a dog.”

  
“A dog’s a dog,” Will says, noncommittally.  “But I’ll allow that it wouldn’t be first choice, no.”

“This dog suits us, Will. He’s just like you and me.”

  
Will laughs, and Prince turns his head to watch him. “What - vicious, scarred up, too smart for his own good?”

  
“Clever, tenacious, fearsome. A fighter and a survivor.”

Will rolls his eyes, but he knows that he can't keep Hannibal from seeing how deeply the words affect him.

“What are we doing about the eye?” Will asks, to change the subject. 

“Flush it when you do the rest, and then just leave it. It will heal, and when it does we can stitch the lid shut, or leave it open if you prefer.

“Won't make a difference to the dog. It's just a matter of aesthetics.”

Hannibal nods, and they go back to work. 

 

When Will lets the dog down on to the floor he puts distance between himself and the two men, but when he and Hannibal move to the sitting room, Prince follows half a dozen paces behind. 

They settle down on the couch and Prince lays down on the other side of the room, watching them. He doesn’t seem stressed, simply cautiously observant. 

Hannibal looks back at Prince with the same seriousness with which the dog regards him. There is, perhaps, a note of uneasiness in Hannibal’s voice when he asks, “Will, about what you said earlier - this dog is too old to destroy shoes… isn’t he?”

“He’s going to need a lot of training,” Will says, equivocating. “He doesn’t have any idea of what our expectations for him are.” Privately, he thinks that even after Prince has learned the rules of the household he will be likely to obey them only selectively. 

“How I’ve suffered for the sake of my love for you,” Hannibal says, with deliberate melodrama. “I hope, Will, that you are very happy with your gift.”

Will, who already has an inkling of whose dog Prince will really be, rolls his eyes again and ignores him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's not really a plot for this universe, beyond general Adventures In Dog Keeping, but I have at least a few more vignettes/drabbles in mind. 
> 
> I am trying to decide if I should post them as chapters to this story or as independent fics, so if you are interested in reading more about these three please feel free to let me know your preference.


End file.
